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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Linux Mint will likely be slowing down how typically it releases its namesake distro.
- We’ll nonetheless see the following distro not lengthy after Ubuntu 26.04 seems.
- Mint will proceed to help X11 and Wayland for now.
My favourite Linux desktop distribution, Linux Mint, is contemplating slowing down its launch cadence. That is as a result of, as lead developer Clement “Clem” Lefebvre defined, whereas releasing typically has labored very nicely, it produces “these incremental enhancements launch after launch. But it surely takes a whole lot of time, and it caps our ambition on the subject of growth. … [so] We’re eager about altering that and adopting an extended growth cycle.”
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So, what does that slower future seem like? Nicely, the following launch will nonetheless comply with the anticipated Ubuntu 26.04 launch in April. That is to not say the forthcoming Mint 23 will look precisely like Resolute Raccoon, Ubuntu 26.04. It will not. Clem and firm have at all times gone their very own method.
The largest distinction is that Ubuntu is shifting over as soon as and for all to the Wayland window supervisor from the virtually 40-year-old X11 Window System. Mint will not be doing that. As a substitute, Clem mentioned Mint would maintain X11 so long as it “works finest for many customers.”
Wayland vs. X11
The variations between these two well-liked windowing programs are profound. They do the identical job — drawing home windows and dealing with enter — however they do it with very completely different architectures and commerce‑offs. X11 is a Eighties shopper–server show protocol during which a central show server (sometimes Xorg) handles drawing, enter, window administration, and plenty of legacy options in a single, ageing stack. Wayland is a more recent household of protocols during which the compositor (Mutter, KWin, wlroots-based, and many others.) is in cost. In Wayland, functions draw their very own content material straight through fashionable APIs equivalent to OpenGL/Vulkan, whereas the compositor composites completed buffers.
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In addition they deal with safety very in another way. Below X11, any shopper can eavesdrop on or intervene with others: it may possibly see international keystrokes, learn the contents of different home windows, and inject enter occasions. This makes it trivial to jot down functions like keyloggers and display scrapers. That very same energy can also be a safety concern. So, Wayland intentionally eliminated these capabilities. Shoppers can not learn one another’s buffers or keystrokes, and options equivalent to screenshots, display sharing, and distant management undergo managed interfaces, making it a lot tougher to construct helpful functions of this sort and likewise making abuse of the desktop rather more troublesome.
That does not imply you’ll be able to’t construct such apps in Wayland. It simply takes extra elbow grease. For instance, the Mint crew is constructing a brand new Cinnamon, Mint’s default desktop screensaver, that may run natively below each X11 and Wayland. Right now’s Cinnamon screensaver is a standalone GTK utility that solely actually is sensible in an X11 surroundings, the place the X server retains it on high of every thing else when the display locks.
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Cinnamon’s personal window supervisor/compositor will render the deliberate alternative straight. It makes use of the identical toolkit that the mission already depends on for the panel, menus, and applets. That shift ought to ship smoother lock animations, a extra built-in look, and “full Wayland help.” Lefebvre describes this because the “final lacking piece of the puzzle for Cinnamon to completely help Wayland.”
Mint is not about to flip the default simply because Wayland help exists. Lefebvre calls present Wayland help “experimental” and says the objective is to have the ability to “help it and begin testing it as a possible answer,” to not pressure it on unwilling customers. As with earlier huge modifications, Mint’s stance is that it’ll finally undertake whichever stack “works finest for many customers,” even when which means X11 and Wayland coexist for a while.
What else to count on
Below the hood, the mission can also be quietly reclaiming territory that almost all customers by no means take into consideration till one thing breaks: Consumer and account administration. Lefebvre laments that almost all Linux desktop environments have constructed their very own user-administration panels, regardless that that is “sometimes an space which belongs to distributions” and one which desktops “can’t be and definitely is not correctly dealt with” upstream.
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Within the subsequent Mint launch, a brand new Administration Instrument (mintsysadm) will take over consumer administration and account particulars in editions the place these desktop-specific instruments will be hidden. The concept is to deal with the duties that truly matter on a typical Mint system. This contains creating customers, permitting them to set their very own passwords, and finishing account setup with out additional admin intervention.
That re-centralization comes with some tangible perks. House listing encryption, beforehand accessible solely at set up time, will likely be totally supported when creating new consumer accounts. This makes it a lot simpler to retrofit encryption onto present programs.
The brand new account UI additionally brings fashionable niceties that desktop customers now count on: webcams work correctly for avatars, together with reside previews and an choice to mirror the picture, and avatar photos get full HiDPI therapy so they give the impression of being crisp on modern shows.
Taken collectively, these strikes underscore Mint’s self-image not simply as a “distribution” however as a coherent working system and consumer expertise, with sufficient in-house engineering to keep away from being boxed in by desktop choices it disagrees with.
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Lefebvre argues that Mint’s “gradual and regular” method is certainly one of its core strengths — incremental evolution that typically irritates customers however by no means basically breaks the expertise they signed up for. One other, he says, is the mission’s independence and willingness to “develop our personal options after we’re not proud of the choice,” whether or not that is sticking to LTS bases, rejecting Canonical’s Snap packaging, or creating Cinnamon in response to a GNOME 3.0, as a result of “it did not really feel like GNOME.”
The trade-off is {that a} rapid-release treadmill limits how bold Mint will be. With a brand new LTS base coming subsequent cycle and, as Lefebvre jokes, the crew “simply ran out of codenames,” Mint is treating this second as a chance to stretch its timeline. Particulars on what “longer” means stay unclear. I would guess Mint will gradual to 1 launch a yr as an alternative of two. I nonetheless count on, nevertheless, to see the following Mint to look shortly after Ubuntu 26.04 ships. My finest guesstimate is Might 2026.
Document donations
If Mint goes to ask customers to belief it by way of a slower however extra opinionated evolution, it helps that the mission’s financials are shifting in the correct route. Not like many different well-liked Linux desktop distros, Mint has no company backing. It is completely paid for by donations.
So when December 2025 introduced in $47,312 in donations from 1,393 particular person donors, a quantity Lefebvre calls “unprecedented” and “humbling,” and one he says makes him “actually pleased with this group,” that is a giant deal. The mission additionally counts 2,017 patrons on Patreon contributing a mixed $4,900 per thirty days. That will sound penny-ante, and it’s in comparison with the multi-million greenback funding rounds we see out of Silicon Valley, however Lefebvre and his crew make it work.
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That cash straight helps retaining Mint impartial of company agendas and comfy rejecting applied sciences it does not imagine serve its customers nicely. It additionally allows the mission builders to spend critical time on unglamorous however needed infrastructure work. For instance, as a result of a flood of AI bots made Mint’s boards “gradual and unreliable” for human guests, Mint upgraded its discussion board server with 10x the CPU and twice the bandwidth.
Mint’s resolution to deal with bots as a denial-of-service drawback fairly than a progress metric matches neatly with its broader philosophy: optimize for precise customers, not AI. For a mission that has constructed its model on being the “it simply works” desktop for folks fleeing different working programs or extra experimental Linux distros, the sign to its group is reassuring.
None of this provides as much as a flashy reinvention of Linux Mint. As a substitute, it sketches a future the place the distro turns into much more itself: conservative in what it exposes to customers, stubbornly impartial when upstream strikes conflict with its design sense, and prepared to spend money on the boring plumbing that holds a desktop collectively.
For desktop Linux customers who selected Mint exactly as a result of it avoids sudden, jarring modifications, that is perhaps an important information of all: the way forward for Linux Mint appears to be like loads like its previous, with only a bit extra time between releases. I like this plan. I prefer it loads.
